


When Everything is Burnt and Gone

by Orlha



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Darcy Lewis, Character death (but not really considering time travel), Death and Rebirth, Fix-It of Sorts, Hurt/Comfort, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-12-03
Packaged: 2018-08-07 05:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7701949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orlha/pseuds/Orlha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy dies and finds herself in her eight year old self and wonders if everything had been a cruel nightmare or perhaps someone had finally done something right and sent her back to save the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. To which Darcy finds herself in the past

 

  
  


 

Darcy wakes up disorientated. There are cicadas chirping away, the dimming rays of sun filtering through the pale pink curtains, drawing strange shadows across her carpet. The bed sheet beneath her face is too smooth to be the ones she had in her bedroom. She doesn’t recognize the room, at least not at first. It takes her several moments before she realises that she is in her childhood room. The little ponies frolicking on a rainbow bridge plaster her blankets along with the fluorescent stars stuck on the ceiling. Between all the missions and fighting she has been doing, Darcy hadn’t had the time to reminiscence of her childhood memories, she barely remembers it to begin with.

She wonders why now? Why now when there are so many other things to dream of?

Darcy sits up; feet swinging off the bed, dangling in the air, still too short to touch the floor. She doesn’t remember sleeping. Had she nodded off, wishing for sweet dreams? She reaches up and touches her throat.

No.

She remembers the blood. She remembers the Spartoi slicing her throat. She remembers the bubble as she pressed her hand to her throat. Too visceral to be a dream.

The stitches on the bedspread feels real, just as the carpet that her feet sinks into.

Too real for this to be a dream as well.

Darcy reaches for the door handle and hears the song that her mommy had sung so long ago as she slips into the hallway and then into the bathroom, clambering onto the stool. This is her, when she was six - when everything was simple, where her daddy and mommy where simple people, where life was simple.

She hasn’t remembered life before eight this clearly ever. She wrote life before eight off when things got too difficult. Sweet memories don’t need to exist when they only bring more pain and suffering.

“Darce baby,” her mother pops her head into the bathroom, her lips curving at the sight of her staring at the mirror.

When had all the deceit started? Darcy eyes her mother, she is under no illusions that her mother wasn’t recruited before she had her. _Hydra_ , her mind hisses at the back of her mind. Her stomach curdles but she schools her face into an innocent face. Darcy is unsure why this dream is so vivid but she plans to find out, she tells herself that as she slips her hand into her mother’s.  

She died, she remembers dying alone on the ship; the ship where only her and Kate were left.

This is not reality and if this is life after death, then this is a goddamn nightmare.

\----

Darcy has been here for two whole years. Today, her parents would ‘die’ in a car crash, tomorrow her ‘long-lost’ aunt would take her in and everything go crashing down. She remembers eight unlike seven and six. She remembers the training that her aunt would put her through so she would be _recruited_ as a Hydra legacy. What would Hydra do if they knew she wasn’t quite the eight year old they thought she was?

What had led her to returning to her six year body, Darcy isn’t sure. The only thing she knows that they can’t find out. If this is a chance to change the future she came from, then she would do it. She’s been trying to search out for a Jane Foster for the last two years but with the current technology, there hasn’t been much luck. So she keeps her head down, calculating her scores to never seem any more than a normal eight year old.

She knows her parents have ‘died’ when Mrs Norman bursts into the classroom. There is a pack at the back of her closet that she packed a week ago. Rolls of cash hidden into her socks to bring her all the way to Miami. It is a calculated risk, but Tony is the only one she can think of that is old enough to take her into custody. Coulson could, except she doesn’t know where he is and he is too close to Shield that is far too close to Hydra. Hydra isn’t important, not at the moment and hopefully never in the future. Darcy swears on everything that matters that she’ll rescue Bucky as soon as she can. The time for that isn’t now. Not in her half-grown body and definitely not without weapons and backup.

Mrs Norman drives her home, her hand pats Darcy’s head in a comforting manner and Darcy only looks out of the window. There is a tingle under her skin, whether it’s a sense of anticipation of things to come or fear, she isn’t quite sure.

The rain patters onto the window, the heavy silence broken by the rhythmic swish of the windshield. Her mind is weary from running probability of changing history. She has debated this since she arrived. If she doesn’t change history, then she’ll know exactly where she would go. Her _dear sweet aunt_ would insist on homeschooling her. The hours of fighting practice and schooling in various languages, then shipped off to ‘military’ school where they are fed with suspicious medicine, where kids who get punished never come back, never to be heard from again.

Darcy pushes the hair from her face, turning to look at Mrs Norman. She’s always wondered if Mrs Norman is part of their gang. It’s not like Hydra has any defining features.The car slows and stops in front of the house.

There is a feeling of something creeping across her shoulder as she walks up the stony path and pushes the door open. She has to get her things and leave tonight, of all the things, Darcy is glad her body still remembers the movements of her ~~past~~ future life even if her body is weak and untrained. It isn’t like she left her body untrained, she spent the last two years sneaking across the house and through the woods to practice but it is not the same sleek way her older body was.

They expect a traumatized little kid and Darcy is nothing if not a good actress. She sprawls herself on her bed, body shaking from large crocodile tears until Mrs Norman leaves to leave her in the hands of her neighbour. Darcy picks the haversack, sliding the window open and heaves herself out onto the drainpipe. She knows she can make it, she tested it.

She is out into the woods, covering her tracks as she makes her way to the bus station. There is a knife in her boot, and another in her pants and she knows how to fucking use them if she needs to. Darcy isn’t the weak little eight year old she once was, she was at least thirty-five when she died and she spent a good ten years on the ships fighting for her life and death. Every item in her hands is a lethal weapon. Still, she plays the weak eight year old. Darcy resigns to getting what she wants by playing the pitiful kid, it’s easier and she would almost feel bad for it were it not for the fact that she _has_ to find Jane.

She slips easily into the crowd by following an adult and blinking her large doleful eyes when stopped. So easy that it almost makes Darcy snort in amusement. In twenty years or so, every transportation is a painful series of checks, every body check is thorough because it has to be. They couldn’t afford to be accommodating. It takes only one Spartoi through to destroy the town.

\----

To be honest, Darcy wasn’t even sure she had the right address. Some time before they all left to fight the Spartois, Tony had brought them to his family mansion. It’s been with the family for generations, she remembers Tony saying that. He always loathed the place, the tall walls and dark red carpets. There is irony that it was their last base. My father would be turning in his grave, he tells them gleefully whenever they rip another part of the house off.

She might have lived with her aunt for a few years before being shipped off to the school. How much would history change if she doesn’t get shipped off? It’s a huge risk but the thought of the school and her ‘aunt’ Amy makes her unable to breathe.

There is no going back now.

She stands before the mansion, her fingers already running across the access code that Tony had given her in a life so long ago. The access code works. She is not surprised, it _is_ after all the master code.

Tony is standing at the doorway frowning at her but she can see is _her_ Tony.

She remembers Tony though he is neither the first to go nor last, she remembers his death keenly. Tony was her best friend after they lost Jane. They shared drinks, shared coding bits, she helped him build robots and equipment.

All she sees Tony is the bloodied helmet in her hand, his armor so crushed that there was saving him. He knows it just like she did.

_He holds her hand, the words that takes him too much effort to say are lost now. Her eyes are hot with bitter tears. How many had she to lose before it stopped hurting? Tony grips her hand so tightly and she places her forehead on his. He smells of sweat and oil, his breaths are a harsh rasp that sounded painful._

_There is a loud keening from her as she rocks him. Darcy takes a moment, wipes her face and picks her rifle up. Bucky is by her side like a ghost. There aren’t any words needed for the feeling in her. She only readies her rifle and her dagger and jumps back into the fray._

“So? Are you going to tell me how you got in or do I need to call the cops?” Tony folds his arms at her. This Tony doesn’t know what he is to her yet and it surprisingly hurts more than Darcy thought it would.

She shakes herself from her reverie and purses her lips. “Hello Tony. You won’t believe me, but I’m from the future and you gave me that code yourself.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I know I have two other active WIPs, but this one stuck in my mind while I trying to get over a personal loss. I had the idea of what if I could go back and do things right again. If anyone reads my recent works, you'll notice the same theme in this and the other, except the other is angsty as hell and this is.. well.. I don't know. Anyway, I thought it might be interesting on the -what if Darcy went back in time where she was a kid and the future was a disaster- and that's we have here. 
> 
> Let me know what you think of it.
> 
> http://luna-orlha.tumblr.com/


	2. To which Darcy faces Jane

Younger Tony is difficult to get accustomed to. It’s almost frightening how Young Tony is different from her Tony. They are familiar in so many ways, but this Tony, he’s still out drinking himself to death because he can’t find a better way of dealing with the things eating in him. This Tony hasn’t seen the death he caused, hasn’t been hurt by the world. He is prideful and full of undeserving vitriol. It makes her almost bitter and hateful. Darcy misses her Tony more than she thought she would even though Tony is just there.

It has its moments like how he just bamboozle people with his dazzling smile and brusque words to get what he wants - not that _her_ Tony doesn’t, he just does it more cleverly, but this is _so_ not one of those moments.

“What the fuck are you doing in my lab?”

Darcy spins around the tall chair that she got Tony’s secretary to deliver. She _needs_ to find Jane Foster and with all her skill, the laptop that Tony gets her isn’t good enough. Yes, she has been spoilt by the technology in her old life. Darcy doesn’t want to contemplate that there is not a single Jane Foster that matches Jane’s profile is in the databases around the world.

What if she is Hydra? Her mind prods at her hesitance. Darcy mentally reviews all the information she has, she doesn’t think it’s possible except nothing is definite and the very probability of Jane being a sleeper agent scares her yet doesn’t surprise her.

“Building a computer?” she raises an eyebrow.

“What is wrong with the one I gave you?” He has an almost petulant look on his face.

“It tells me that Jane Foster doesn’t exist,” she turns back to her motherboard, fiddling with chips she made from a mish-mash of stuff that Tony’s lab has.

“You still haven’t told me what you want to do after you find her.”

 _Kill her._ The words flicker across her mind before she can banish them away. It’s only anger and misplaced hatred, Darcy reminds herself. Time is ticking down for the world and no one save for her can see it.

Darcy wonders why it was only her that got sent back here. She can’t seek out Kate yet. Kate, her baby Hawkeye, isn’t even born yet.  She doesn’t think Kate stayed alive much longer than her. She hopes not. The spaceship that ended up being their last stand was haunted with memories of the first Avengers and then the young Avengers.

What happens when even the superheroes fail?

There isn’t a need to question that, she already knows. She has seen cities destroyed, people taking the ships because they are the only safe place left. There is much certainty that the Spartoi won the cruel war she had been stuck in from her dying breath.

Darcy doesn’t tell him of these things. She doesn’t tell him that in a short few years he would be captured by terrorists working for his business partner, she doesn’t tell him that the aliens would come, invited by the wrong portal. She does tell him that the aliens would wipe out the planet.

Tony believes her. Her memory of his mansion is impeccable and she has proven of facts that no one but himself should have known. Tony believes her and she is thankful for that, he has sheltered her and all but adopted her to ‘care’ for her.

She should be honest to him but honesty has never helped anyone. “I don’t know,” so she lies, or is she telling the truth? The more she lives in this world, the more she forgets about the war from an old time.

“Should I be worried?”

His brown eyes catches hers. For the past seven years, she has been training herself, pushing herself to be the Black Widow she once was - the title she once inherited from Natasha. Darcy isn’t the chubby, pink-faced eight year old anymore, her fifteen year old body is lithe and well-toned. She kept up with the training her thirty-five year old body had been doing. Her fighting style is ruthless and savage and Darcy is not apologetic about it at all. It is a fighting style born from the depths of a long war. There is no compassion in war, no energy for kindness, no time for patience.

She _has_ to do what is right for the world.

Darcy tells herself that every day, and every day she believes in it a little less.

“No.” But whether that is the truth or a lie, even Darcy herself can’t tell anymore.

\----

She’s finally found Jane. Jane Elizabeth Foster is formerly Jane Elizabeth Kincaid. Her parents divorced and she followed her mother’s maiden name. Kincaid was her father’s name. The whole time, Darcy had been looking for the wrong person. It was so obvious, so stupidly obvious.

Tony is preoccupied with being Iron Man so she doesn’t tell him. Darcy slips one of his prototype pistols into her bag and hacks her way into being Jane’s intern again. Never mind that she’s never attended college let alone a science degree.

It wouldn’t matter once she meets Jane. It wouldn’t matter that if she goes down this path she would never meet Steve or save Bucky. She misses her boys so much that even all the years since their deaths and her rebirth, she tastes her loss as keenly as she did then.

Their eyes haunt her in her nightmares, their words echo hollowly in her. If she goes down this path, she would change the future of the world. It wouldn’t matter if Jane had done it on purpose or by accident. The bi-frost bridge she built had been the beginning of the end that no one would have ever wished for.

She sees Jane in her flannel shirt, her messy hair and the cardboard that has equations scrawled around her name. The gun that she had masterfully kept hidden weighs heavily in her boot. Just a clean shot through her head and another in the chest to make sure she’s dead. Just one dead to save billions.

Darcy shallows tightly and steps towards Jane. Her hand twitches with each step.

Jane, her sweet Jane, was the kind person before everything when to shit, before the Spartois took over her. Jane who was always about making the transference of data through realms easier, that was what the bifrost portal meant for. It had not been like she had planned to have the Spartois be alerted to the portal or for them to invade Earth, or even for them to take over them.

Even Darcy knows that is the truth, she can’t shake the memory of Jane before Bucky finally shot her.

_Her face was ashen, bags lining her once green eyes. Jane looks like shit and as a Spartoi ally, Darcy had expected her to be better kept. So allies weren’t treated that well either. The thought of that was somehow hilarious to her._

_“My death is only the beginning,” Jane says. “My work is a masterpiece and they shall never stop.”_

_“No. They will be stopped.” Darcy pulls the knife from her wrist sheath. “They will be stopped when we’re done killing them.” She gives Jane a feral grin but she is truly tired of it all. How many more does she have to watch die, how many more does she have to kill?_

_Bucky places his hand on her shoulder. He doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t need to. Darcy knows what he is saying without words. Her hand drops tiredly to her side and instead, Bucky raises his pistol to the battered woman that is tied to the ground._

_“We will win!” she screeches, apoplectic with rage then silence as Bucky empties his gun into her. Her vacant blue eyes stares into Darcy, accusing her of the things she had done, accusing her of things that she should done.  It isn’t her fault, Bucky tells her. The weight of his hand on her shoulder is comforting and guilty._

_Darcy is alive and Jane isn’t, and she doesn’t deserve that._

There has to be a better way than killing Jane outright. She still has to save Bucky. To get herself incarcerated over this wouldn’t help Bucky. No. She can wait a little longer, free Bucky and come back to deal with Jane. She won’t finish the bifrost for another six years.

Darcy lets a smile cross her face and waves wildly to Jane. “Hello! I’m Darcy Lewis! I think I’m your intern.” She’ll play the part of ditzy intern to the maximum effect. Shield will come here in three months and then she can finally make contact with Coulson.

So now she only has six years left to save the world.

Fuck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if this is turning out as anyone expected. Or if the style of writing fits anyone. I think the story of this style is different from my usual style - not sure if that turns anyone off.


	3. In which she no longer is awed by Coulson

Young Coulson isn’t quite as she remembered. Her Coulson - or rather Older Coulson, because she has never been quite close to him in the later years - is astonishingly efficient and exceptionally quick on the uptake. Young Coulson doesn’t have the skills like Older Coulson does.

“Well, you’re certainly not _just_ an intern,” Young Coulson says to her after blinking several times at her. Darcy takes a moment to mourn for the Older Coulson. Older Coulson would never have jumped when she detached herself from the shadows to speak to him, let alone allow surprise coat his words. Okay, but maybe catching him off-guard is almost amusing.

She can’t help being almost stalkerish. She had many years of stealth training from Hydra then latter Natasha before she passed. Stealth training had been something she kept up rigorously, admittedly pranking Tony was a lot more fun that way.

“Well?” Coulson furrows his eyebrows, standing so still by the doorway, as though he thinks he can yell for backup before she can kill him. He can’t, but he doesn’t know that _yet._ Tony is right, she does do a lot of reminiscing in her age now. She _is, a_ fter all, at least forty-seven now if she counts her life before her death and rebirth. Somewhere in her, Darcy still wonders if this is some kind of elaborate dream. Like Inception of something. It _is_ possible.

“I have information,” she tells him and crosses her legs, letting a little moonlight from the window glaze across her half-shadowed body. Darcy sits forward so that Coulson can see her face in the dim light. Not that it helps him. She has had years of practice to hide her emotion from everyone that even she, herself wonders if she’s experiencing the emotion or merely telegraphing it to appear normal.

He considers her words and she can see his mind working the cogs. “What kind of information?” Coulson asks, taking a seat across her.

“My name is Darcy Lewis, but you already know that.” Darcy digs her elbows into her thighs. “I know stuff that you don’t, but you’ve probably guessed that. What kind of stuff, that is what you want to know.”

She grabs his hand in a motion too fast him to evade. “This information must never leave this room. It is for you and only you. I don’t trust Nicky, and I most certainly _don’t_ trust Shield.”

“What kind of information are you giving?” Coulson, the ever so cautious man, asks. His words are steady without a skip but she can feel his heart throb faster under her fingers. Even the best spies can’t hide that.

“The future- and a billion of lives at stake,” Darcy tells him, sotto voce. “The entire world that you know.”

“I can’t make these kind of decisions.”

“You don’t have a choice.” She debates telling him about Hydra, her mind argues that leaving the snake in the can makes it easier to burn, but she can’t do it alone. She misses her team, the team that took over when the Avengers perished in the first few waves. The teamwork, the burden shouldered among the many of them. Her heart cries for them. Although Coulson would never be them, she can reach out and try to let him help. Tony can’t, Tony will be far too close to know, especially with Stane and all the bullshit going on.

Coulson stares at her. His eyes unwavering as they bore into her with a heat that scorched to her very soul. Darcy knows this look, she lets him have his moment. Then she continues. “I am from the future where the world was destroyed. You were my handler before you died in the future. I died and somehow have travelled back into the past. You want proof on what I say is true, but I can’t prove anything when it has yet to come. I _can_ , however, tell you that when you were a very young kid, the reason why Captain America is your hero is because of your father.”

She tells him of what she knows, she knows she has bulldozed him over with a truth that he had never told anyone, it _is_ a story that Older Coulson told her - a story that he told only her and Nick Fury. Darcy stands and slips to the window. “Find me when you find Captain America.” Cocking her head at him, she smiles ruefully. “He is still alive, you know? You should definitely find your card collection for him to sign.”

\----

Darcy’s not surprised when Coulson turns up behind her when she’s queuing for her morning coffee. He always had a flair for dramatics, even Older Coulson.

“I don’t have anything for you” she tells him without even turning her head. The game they’ve been playing since before Captain America has worn her thin. They keep asking and she keeps telling. Darcy already knows he and Fury wouldn’t trust so easily. They will want another and yet another proof. She traces the rim of her cup of coffee, then sets her cup of coffee along with Jane’s in a cup holder onto the table.

“I’m sure there is more you can tell me.”

Darcy feels his gaze on her, the sharp look that her Coulson used to give her when she pulled her shenanigans and made her feel like a little girl all over again. “I can’t do this anymore, Phil,” she says lowly. She’s not the little girl she was in her past life, the sharp look he has on his face doesn’t have that effect on her anymore - if anything it just makes her mad. He has no right to judge her. She has out-survived all the original Avengers, survived almost three years of frontline war with no one but the Young Avengers at her back. She’s been to hell and back, died and came back to save them. “This game you’re playing, I’m done playing. I don’t care if you believe me, I don’t care what happens to your petty little organisation. I have bigger things to worry about.”

She leans forward, gritting her teeth as she clutches the cup holder. She flicks her eyes up, catching his eyes with her blue orbs. Her close friend, her handler, her surrogate father. The words choke on her throat. “A war is coming. A war that will destroy everything we know. A war so mighty that even the Asgard could do little. While you play your petty little games, I am trying to stop the future I know from happening. I saw everyone die. I saw _you_ die, Phil. I watched you as you climbed into their ship and became one of them. I saw Steve put you down so you wouldn’t turn on us.”

Darcy feels sick at the memories. Which past life memories don’t anymore? All the memories she held tightly to her heart were the deaths of her friends, a reminder of the things she’s fighting for. Even now, she’s sabotaging Jane’s experiments to stop her from ever succeeding. It’s terribly unfair but it’s the only way she can think of that doesn’t end with Jane’s death.

She stands, collecting her composure around her like a meshed armor. “Find me when you are ready to join the big boys.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *screams* Bucky next chapter!! ｡ﾟ✶ฺ.ヽ(*´∀`*)ﾉ.✶ฺﾟ｡


	4. To which Darcy gives Bucky up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this was an incredibly slow update. I was extremely dissatisfied with this chapter and have rewritten it several times, but ugh, I figured it was better for an update than nothing at all. So I barrelled through and well, this is the best dissatisfied version I have of this chapter. I'm sorry if it's terrible, I really tried. :(

Coulson hasn’t visited her like she hoped he would. It doesn’t matter. Time is short and more expensive that he can ever quantify it. She has a super soldier to break out and it doesn’t matter if he’s in or not.

Steve is in the kitchen making waffles for Natasha and himself when she steps off the elevator. In her past life, Darcy didn’t get to meet the super soldier until much later. She wonders if he’ll disappoint her like Coulson did. Next to Jane, Steve was her best friend. He was her pillar of support. She’s almost tempted to play the ditzy intern fan-girl act, the same way she met Steve for the first time. 

“I have something that you’ll be interested in,” she says to Steve but nods at Natasha who she knows would have noticed her lithely built muscles and the way she moves during spars with Happy. If there is anyone she isn’t likely to fool without a large disguise, it would be Natasha. That said, she’s never tried fooling Natasha. Darcy has always answered her questions honestly and Natasha, perhaps as a favour, has treated her likewise. 

“I didn’t get a mission notice,” Steve replies. 

Darcy shakes her head with an amused smile. “I said interested in. I didn’t use the word  _ mission. _ ”

His eyes slides down her stealth suit, the pistols clipped on the sides of her thighs, the hunting knives tucked at the small of her back. She can see Steve stiffening to her strangely imposing figure. She had been introduced to them by Tony as his daughter, a loud mouthed science lab assistant and never once as someone who could possibly do missions with that. That was the way she likes it and Tony for all his loud mouth tendencies feels somehow inclined to protect her. He indulges in her farcical behaviour with great exuberance.

“Bucky Buchanan Barnes, codename Winter Soldier.”  Darcy throws a file on the table and a bunch of pictures of Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, spills out. It catches their attention like she knows it would. Steve as an old friend and Natasha as an old trainer who had helped her break out. They would be predisposed to help an old ally. “Siberia, wheels up in 10,” she squares her shoulders, unwilling to let either of them intimidate her.

Darcy has never minced her words and she hasn’t lied to him. Even if Tony had not been pleased with the knowledge of Bucky assassinating his parents, he understood that Bucky had not been himself.  He had read the uncensored file of James Buchanan Barnes that she had stolen from deep within Shield. The things they have done to the once Howling Commando Hero is beyond belief. Darcy doesn’t tell him everything. She doesn’t tell him that Howard had the opportunity of retrieving Bucky, she doesn’t tell him that Howard chose to leave him there. Tony doesn’t ask questions that has answers he doesn’t want to hear, so she doesn’t tell him.

Steve, on the other hand, does. The image of the man he once had considered his brother in arms has diminished and he stops comparing Tony to Howard and starts seeing Tony as his own person for the first time. 

She decides she likes this Steve better than her Steve. This Steve isn’t grim and somber like her Steve, he still acts like he carries the weight of the world on his back, but Darcy sees the sparkle of wonderment in his eyes as he wanders around. It’s still small, but it grows every day.

Steve is there like she knew he would be, Tony too, he is always dependable when she tells him she needs him. They’re not her Avengers but she would trust them with her life.

\----

The compound is probably unlike anything the Avengers would have imagined, it is dank, dark and the stench of rotting flesh permeates even through Tony’s suit filters. The last time she had been down here, it was with Tony in pursuit of Bucky with Steve and her throwing themselves on him to buy Bucky time to get out. This time had gone down so much differently. 

Steve gags on the smell, but the smell is macabrely nostalgic to Darcy. It reminds her of her last few days alive in her past life where Kate and her had to leave the bodies on the ground. 

She forgoes her pistols when the guards attack, her hand instinctively drawing the hunting knife and driving them across the guard’s throat. She snaps the other guard’s neck with her thighs, plunging her knife into his chest and twisting, just to be sure. The Spartois have a way of coming back to life if she’s not careful. 

Darcy isn’t in the twenty-first century anymore, she’s back on the ship, hopping from enemy to enemy. Her knife is a brutal, merciless weapon, a crimson arc as she slashes and dodges, slewing through flesh and one with the utmost efficiency. She breathes shallowly to converse what little air the filters can process, sidestepping the supporting fire from Kate.

She is the last line of defense to the inhabitants of the ship. She has to protect them, protect the little kid thad waved at her, protect his mother that has been crippled from one of the attacks.

“-rcy! Darcy!” 

The suit grabs her arm and Darcy snaps out of it, her chest rising and falling erratically as she struggles to bring herself back into control. She’s not on the ship, she’s in the underground bunker with the Original Avengers, she’s saving Bucky three years earlier than her timeline had.

“Are you back with us?” Tony asks. Darcy is ashamed for losing herself and she nods mutely, unable to trust her voice at the moment.

From the corner of her eye, she can see the other three Avengers eyeing her apprehensively. There are broken bodies strewn across the cold, concrete floor. Their arms snapped, their heads cut, just the way one kills a Spartoi. She sheathes her hunting knives, ignoring the trembling in her hands. 

Tony palms her back, steadying her shaky sense of self. She’s never had a flashback this bad, but that’s a given; Darcy has never been close to anything remotely triggering since the only triggering things are war time scenarios.

“According to the scans, there are some strange life signs further down,” Tony says. He steps forward, away from Darcy and Steve steps up to him discuss.

“I’ve never seen you move like that,” Natasha inclines her head. A twist of emotions that wouldn’t have been noticed by Darcy had she not been familiar with them flirts across her face. 

“I wasn’t trained by the Red Room,” Darcy replies the unanswered question. At least not in this life. 

Natasha chuckles lowly, in spite of the lack of mirth. “Darcy, the Red Room operatives don’t move like that.” She catches Darcy by the arm, her nails digging into her flesh. “Who are you really?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Darcy turns. She knows Natasha wouldn’t accept the truth, that the truth is harder for particularly her to understand. 

_ “You don’t remember it, but the first time I saw you, it was in London,” Bucky says to her. “It was cold, freezing. I wanted to run away but I wasn’t Bucky yet then and I wasn’t the Soldier either.” He turns from the view of the slowly spinning earth to gaze at her. “The aliens didn’t let me of course. They were very intent on stopping anyone from escaping even if it was detrimental to them.” They both chuckle and she shuffles closer to him, weaving her fingers through his.  _

_ “I almost lost it. Then there was you and the way you were flipping cars to smash them. And that was the first time I saw you. Stalked you months after that.” _

_ “Aww. Was that love at first sight?” _

_ He scratches his nose, embarrassed. “Probably. Also was tempted to shoot that boy every time you two kissed.” _

_ She leans forward and kisses him hard. “I’m yours now.” _

_ “Yea…” he kisses her back equally hard. “But boy was that a first impression. I could never forget the way you beat those aliens up.” _

Darcy stares at the cyro that held Bucky. It wouldn’t be the same like it was in her first lifetime. Nothing is the same in this life now. Without realising, she has distanced herself from the people she had once trusted with her life. They weren’t the people she remembered, it wasn’t the same way she met them and that had rippled into the type of relationships she had with them. 

Would Bucky be another casualty in the draft caused by her butterfly wings?

She is tempted to turn back, to flee from this facility. There is still time for her to hide, to preserve at least the way Bucky sees her for the first time. It matters far more than she would admit to herself.

“He’ll be fine,” Tony assures her, thinking the trembling in her limbs are from the fear.

_ He would, but would she be? _

Darcy holds herself together long enough to see Steve embrace Bucky before escaping into the jet.

At least he’s safe now, even if he doesn’t fall in love with her again, even if they never end up together. A tear streaks down her face faster than she can stop it and she wipes it away angrily.

She has the world to save, she doesn’t need anything to distract her. 


End file.
